Home > Work > The Long Utopia (The Long Earth #4)
1 " I guess the truth is nobody told this smart kid that communication between such divergent life forms was impossible, so he just went ahead and did it anyhow. "
― Terry Pratchett , The Long Utopia (The Long Earth #4)
2 " Life gets boring with only humans to talk to. "
3 " Apprehend. Be humble in the face of the universe. Do good. Eleven words. Three rules. "
4 " I despise the religions we have, nothing but flummery and manipulation based on texts and materials so reworked over time they’re all meaningless. I despise the division religions religions bring; humans have enough problems without that. I despise con men like Father Melly. And yet, and yet … "
5 " Agnes could read the history of this place, this hilltop. The first settlers here must have made a start clearing fields for their crops or livestock, even put up these grand houses. Then, after no tile at all, they had evidently given up and wondered off to do – well, whatever it was most people did around here to make a living these days. And now here was the forest already taking back the land, or trying to. "
6 " PROFESSOR EMERITUS WOTAN Ulm, of the University of Oxford East 5, author of the bestselling if controversial memoir Peer Reviewers and Other Idiots: A Life In Academia, had consented to give a recorded lecture on von Neumann replicators to be carried as briefing material on the US Navy twain USS Brian Cowley. "
7 " Fortune, he thought, follows the already fortunate. "
8 " Apprehend. Which is a nice word if you roll it around your mouth. Apprehend. ‘It doesn’t just mean “understand”, although it includes that meaning, fully. It means you should face the truth of the world – not let yourself be fooled by how you’d like it to be. You should try to be fully aware of the richness of reality, of the mixed-up complexity of all the processes going right back to the birth of the stars that have produced you and the world you live in, and this very moment . . . ‘And "
9 " PROFESSOR EMERITUS WOTAN Ulm, of the University of Oxford East 5, author of the bestselling if controversial memoir Peer Reviewers and Other Idiots: A Life In Academia, had consented to give a recorded lecture "
10 " Can I have that last chicken sandwich? "
11 " Chak pa! "
12 " I know not how I seem to others, but to myself I am but a small child wandering upon the vast shores of knowledge, every now and then finding a small bright pebble to content myself with while the vast ocean of undiscovered truth lies before me . . .”’ Agnes "
13 " Windsor Castle seemed to Luis from without an intimidating pile, an excrescence of centuries of wealth heaped up on a core of medieval brutality. "
14 " Hey, kitty. So you found the nest? "
15 " we should reach for the numinous, you see, not through the infinite but through the infinitesimal. "
16 " And Joshua saw that that really was how Rod thought about the world, or worlds: as a kind of endless now, an endless here, a place where location and time didn’t matter – and endlessly generous, a place you didn’t need to work at, didn’t need to build on, or fix. A place of endless escape. "
17 " In a place like this you can reject the answers those builders accepted, you can even reject the questions they asked, but you have to cherish the urge to ask such sublime questions in the first place. "